If Republicans Love States’ Rights So Much, Why Do They Want to Be President?

Whatever their differences, the leading Republican candidates all swear that they love
states’ rights. If elected president, Rick Perry vows to “try to make
Washington as inconsequential as I can.” Mitt Romney declares his faith
in the Constitution, which, he says, declares that the government “that
would deal primarily with citizens at the local level would be local and
state government, not the federal government.” Michele Bachmann
“respect[s] the rights of states to come up with their own answers and
their own solutions to compete with one another.” With lots of help from
the Tea Party, the Tenth Amendment which, not so long ago was familiar
mainly to constitutional lawyers and scholars, may now be as popular as
the First or the Second. But, what this resurgence of federalism
overlooks is not just the historical consolidation of federal power but
also the inanity of attempts to reverse it.

For most of U.S. history, the primacy of federalism was taken for
granted. Except during major wars, states exerted far more power over
the daily lives of their residents than did any of the three branches of
a national government located in a swampy river city on the
Mid-Atlantic seaboard that most Americans had never visited. In the
nineteenth century, as the historian Gary Gerstle explains,
states funded canals, highways, and railroads. They decided which
groups could vote and which could not. Some tried to regulate working
hours. Others outlawed a variety of private acts—interracial marriage,
drinking, and theater-going. In 1837, Illinois even forbade “playing at
ball or flying of kites” as public nuisances.

All
these policies fell under the legal sanction of “the police power,”
which one influential Massachusetts judge in 1851 defined broadly as
insuring the “good and welfare of the Commonwealth.” For its part, the
Supreme Court, until after World War I, rather consistently ruled that
the celebrated protections of the Bill of Rights—from the freedom of
speech and the press to the right to a speedy trial—applied only to acts
by the federal government and not to those of the states.

But, by the middle of the twentieth century, this arrangement no
longer served the needs or desires of most Americans. During the Great
Depression, state revenues, based mainly on property taxes, plummeted.
The federal government stepped in to provide relief, and citizens
everywhere began to count on Washington to keep the economy afloat and
their Social Security checks arriving promptly. Then World War II and
the cold war bound Americans to a national-security state that financed
education for veterans and interstate highways as well as aircraft
carriers and nuclear weapons. In the 1960s and ’70s, Congress passed
laws to safeguard the civil and voting rights of every citizen,
regardless of where he or she might live. Policies to protect the
environment and regulate hazards at the workplace further diminished the
sway of state governments. The Supreme Court, even with a conservative
majority, has done little to reverse these changes.

Yet, states’ rights never lost its appeal to that minority of
Americans who are ideologically committed to lambasting the federal
state as both overweening and ineffective. (It should come as no
surprise that these conservatives were so alarmed at the emergency
measures taken by the Bush and Obama administrations to address the
financial meltdown of 2008: the formation and rapid growth of the Tea
Party was the predictable result.)However, any Republican elected to the
White House in 2012 will find it impossible to lead a headlong charge
back to the past, and not just because of the difficulty of undoing a
half-century of tradition and Supreme Court precedent.

Voters unhappy with the inability of the federal government to restore prosperity may like the sound
of “states’ rights.” But how many would trust their governors and state
legislators to pay their Medicare and Social Security checks on time
and at current or higher levels? How many really want 50 separate
immigration policies or 50 different standards for what constitutes
clean air and clean water? Or the possibility that a state, seeking to
lure business away from its neighbors, could cut the minimum wage in
half and not requiring employers to pay for overtime?

When you look more broadly at their promises, the GOP hopefuls reveal
the emptiness of their own rhetoric. Bachmann, never a paragon of
consistency, supports a federal constitutional amendment banning gay
marriage, as well as the right of individual states to legalize it. In
2007, before Romney got in trouble for his Massachusetts health care
law, he predicted, “that
all these states … who follow the path that we pursued will find it’s
the best path, and we’ll end up with a nation that’s taken a mandate
approach.” Rick Perry favors federal action to stop gay marriage and
restrict abortion—and, last month, asked President Obama to speed up aid
to stop wildfires from burning up whole sections of his vast state.
Like a lot of other Americans, these ambitious conservatives like to
rail against Washington in the abstract but cannot imagine how the
nation would operate without a strong central government. And the
specifics of their smaller hypocrisies are underscored by one giant
irony: They’re all running for president.

The U.S. has long ceased to be a country in which most people
look to their state instead of to the national government to address and
solve their most vital problems. State pride is pretty rare these days,
except for residents and alumni who dress in the old-school colors and
root hard for a college football or basketball team from a major public
university.

Of course, state governments still perform a vital role in education
and economic development and can still be “laboratories of democracy,”
sites for testing out new policies that aren’t yet ready for national
consumption. Progressives who cheered when New York legalized gay
marriage and look forward to the day when Vermont begins operating the
single-payer health care system it passed this spring can hardly object,
at least in principle, when red states pass laws they abhor. But, as an
alternative philosophy of governance in a modern nation, states’ rights
is very wrong. In fact, it’s ridiculous.

Michael Kazin is the author of the new book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. He teaches history at Georgetown University and is co-editor of Dissent.

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